Here is a stat that might surprise you: February is supposed to be one of Western Australia's quieter months for hospital emergency departments. Summer illness patterns are lighter than winter, flu season is still weeks away, and the pressure that turns July into a nightmare for paramedics has yet to build. Which makes the figure released this week all the more alarming. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, ambulances spent nearly 4,893 hours parked outside WA's public hospitals last month, waiting to hand over their patients — the worst February on record.
When you dig into the data, the trajectory is unmistakable. The Australian Medical Association (WA) reported that January 2026 clocked 4,513 hours of ramping, itself a figure that would have been considered extraordinary just five years ago. December 2025 came in at 4,540 hours. The system is not recovering between months. It is flatly refusing to improve. And if the seasonal pattern holds — as it has held, without fail, for years — the approaching winter will push those numbers far higher still.
The worst single month on record for WA ambulance ramping was July 2025, when ambulances queued outside hospital emergency departments for more than 7,000 hours. That figure prompted Premier Roger Cook to publicly blame the federal government, arguing that aged care capacity failures were forcing patients to occupy hospital beds they no longer needed, blocking the flow of new admissions. There is genuine substance to that argument. When patients who are clinically ready to leave cannot be discharged because no aged care placement exists for them, hospital beds stay occupied, emergency departments cannot clear their backlogs, and ambulances sit on the ramp. It is a blockage that begins outside the hospital system and ends with a paramedic unable to respond to the next triple-zero call.
But the Premier's argument, while not without merit, sits uneasily alongside WA's broader performance data. An independent Productivity Commission Report on Government Services found that across all five emergency department triage categories, only 46 per cent of WA patients were seen within clinically recommended timeframes, compared to a national average of 67 per cent. WA is, by that measure, the worst-performing state in the country. That cannot be explained by aged care policy alone.
The Australian Medical Association's Ambulance Ramping Report Card 2025 — the first to track five-year trends across all states and territories — described levels of ramping nationally as "alarming", with some states still recording double the ramping hours they had five years ago. AMA President Dr Danielle McMullen pointed to what clinicians call "exit block" as a core driver: patients who are ready to be discharged but cannot leave because they have nowhere suitable to go, be it an aged care facility, disability accommodation, or supported home care. Those patients occupy beds. Those beds are unavailable to emergency admissions. And so the chain of delay runs backwards, all the way to the ambulance sitting in the car park.
The WA opposition has been blunt. Shadow Health Minister Libby Mettam noted that when Premier Cook was in opposition, he once described 1,000 hours of monthly ramping as a "crisis". The state is now recording more than four times that figure in its quieter summer months. Opposition Leader Basil Zempilas has called on the government to make health its unambiguous first priority, arguing that other capital spending commitments are crowding out the urgent investment hospitals need.
Beyond the scoreboard, the real story is what ramping means for patients who never appear in these statistics at all. When an ambulance is parked at an emergency department, it is not available to respond to the next call. Research cited in the Western Australian Parliament found that if offload delays exceed 17 minutes, patient outcomes begin to deteriorate measurably. At nearly 4,893 hours of delay across a single month, the cumulative risk to WA patients is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is real, it is documented, and it is growing.
St John WA, which tracks and publishes ramping data publicly, defines ramping as any handover that takes longer than 30 minutes from the time an ambulance arrives at an emergency department. That transparency is valuable and should be replicated nationally in a standardised way. At present, states measure and report ramping differently, making direct comparisons difficult and accountability harder to enforce.
There is a reasonable case that both sides of politics have at times prioritised the optics of this debate over its substance. The Cook government has been slow to acknowledge structural capacity problems, while the opposition's criticism, though factually grounded, has not always been matched by detailed alternative policy proposals. What the evidence does support, across partisan lines, is this: funding injections alone will not fix ramping if patient flow constraints remain. More beds are needed, but so is a functioning pipeline in aged care and disability support that allows patients to move out of acute care when they no longer need it.
The February 2026 figure is a record for a summer month. Winter, historically, more than doubles the pressure. If WA's hospitals enter June and July already stressed at these levels, the state's health system will face a genuinely difficult test — one that no single blame attribution, federal or state, will adequately explain away.